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D&D provides a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {